Mogadishu: Al-Qaida fears rise

An Islamic militia with alleged al-Qaida links has seized Somalia’s capital Mogadishu after weeks of bloody fighting with US-backed secular warlords, raising fears that the nation could fall under the sway of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organisation.

After 15 years of anarchy in the Horn of Africa nation, the Islamic militia’s advance unified the city for the first time in more than a decade and posed a direct challenge to a fledgling UN-backed Somali government.

“We won the fight against the enemy of Islam, Mogadishu is under control of its people,” Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, said on a radio broadcast yesterday. The militia now controls a 100km radius around the capital after fighting off a secular alliance of warlords.

The Islamic militia is gaining ground just as the UN-backed interim government struggles to assert control outside its base in Baidoa, 250km from Mogadishu. Weapons prices soared there yesterday amid fears that the militia could head to Baidoa next.

The militia is the first group to consolidate control over all of Mogadishu’s neighbourhoods since the last government collapsed in 1991 and warlords took over, dividing the impoverished country of eight million into a patchwork of rival fiefdoms.

Omar Jamal, director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Centre in St. Paul, Minnesota, said the Islamic militia’s victory in Mogadishu was a major turning point in the country’s history.

“It is exactly the same thing that happened with the rise to power of the Taliban,” he said, adding that the extremists are “using the people’s weariness of violence, rape and civil war” to gain support for a government based on Islamic law.

The battle between the militia and the secular alliance has been intensifying in recent months, with more than 300 people killed and 1,700 wounded – many of them civilians caught in the crossfire of grenades, machine guns and mortars.

Alliance leaders could not be reached for comment yesterday and had probably fled Mogadishu. One of them, warlord Mohamed Dheere, was believed to be in neighbouring Ethiopia seeking reinforcements.

The US is backing the secular alliance in an attempt to root out any al-Qaida members operating in the Horn of Africa. US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, have confirmed co-operating with the warlords. Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, president of Somalia's transitional national government, has said Washington is funding the alliance.

The administration of US President George Bush has not confirmed or denied backing the alliance, saying only that they support those who fight terror.

The US has not carried out any direct action in Somalia since the deaths of 18 servicemen in a 1993 battle in Mogadishu depicted in the film “Black Hawk Down”.